I am re-reading The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien and there is a part (p.80) in which he describes how Nellas taught Turin…

“…to speak the Sindarin tongue after the manner of the ancient realm, older, and more courteous, and richer in beautiful words.”

Does that not capture your imagination?  I felt a moment of loss.  How easy it is to let our patterns of speech devolve into brief, simplistic, unimaginative statements.  I wish I could speak in the manner he describes.  Have we forgotten how?

I have long thought that, as part of training our clients in public speaking, we should start by having them learn to read Shakespeare aloud.  I’m serious.

(Note to self: Consider for EE611.  Oh, and mention to Jennifer).

(Last summer, we did at least employ the Gettysburg Address as a teaching tool.)

I will add something else to this discussion.  This is from another book I recommend, A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, p.21.  Here, Lewis speaks of the technique of the epic and says this:

“The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected.  But in Epic, which is the highest species of oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being colloquial or commonplace.  The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one.  We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not.  They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them?”

This is true for a leader as well.  There is an art to speaking in a style that conveys confident leadership.